Adventure Forty-four: Oh Mista Hart

The 1000 AD overview, just as I declare war on Babylon with the stack you see there. It's nice and tidy, though a bit diffuse in that I have more horses that will catch up by the time the siege bombards. Babylon city had the Great Lighthouse which made it a keeper.

I bulbed both Optics and Astronomy. That consumed my Great Scientists instead of my planned bulb of Chemistry, but it's okay. I'll finish off my continent in the trebuchet era before I'd get to Grenadiers anyway. And I want both Astronomy and Grenadiers to conquer the far continent, so it doesn't particularly matter which order I get the techs.

With Astronomy, I still stayed in Mercantilism. Foreign trade is most absolutely not worth it to pick up about six intercontinental trade routes total while giving my rivals about four each!

Babylon fell easily (trebs vs archers). Then it was time to attack Boudica, who does have both macemen and longbows. I still lack Civil Service, so without macemen or knights, had no good way to defend a trebuchet stack. Fortunately, there's an answer right here on the tech tree: muskets.

Two turns before I was ready to declare on the Celts, look what showed up. I would much much prefer that Boudica not get a couple grand cash for upgrades. Answer: close borders!

Crap - I accidentally broke the variant briefly again. I still had two caravels and started building galleons. I deleted the caravels as soon as I realized, though they did have a game impact, exploring territory in the meantime and killing one barb galley. Can I count the caravels as recon units since that's what they were doing?

I also dearly wanted to play with Privateers! This would be the perfect situation for them! I beelined the techs. We lack iron for either Frigates, Ships of the Line, or Ironclads. But Privateers can be built with only copper. And I could make great use of them to harass and pillage my overseas targets before actual invasion. But the variant prevents it since we need galleons too. Big frowny face.

Anyway, here's the big battle of the Celt war. Boudica's got a decent army, but I've got more than enough trebuchets for the task. It took only three treb losses (winning four out of five at 50-60% odds) to raze the city.

Next I got to play another favorite timesaving tactical trick. Use ships to speed up movement even for conquering on the same continent. Usually this doesn't happen on pangaea-type maps when boats aren't worthwhile to build. But here, I'd need the galleons to conquer the far mini-continent, so may as well put them to use beforehand. As each unit healed on the marked tile, I pulled it onto a boat and shipped it over to the capital.

Hey, here's a lightbulb play that I've never seen before: Military Science. This whole bulb path (Optics, Astro, Mil Science) was possible thanks to skipping Civil Service, blocking the whole Paper-Education-Printing Press-Liberalism line. So I deleted my 3 remaining muskets, and started upgrading vultures to grenadiers.

Grenadiers would be the last tech I'd need. I traded for Theology, fired my 2-man Golden Age for Theocracy. Once all the vultures were upgraded, I now had no melee units, so was free to build Macemen and upgrade them to City Raider grenadiers.

I lost no time, declaring war on the Khmer the same turn I eliminated the Celts. I caught the AI patrolling around its units, and got a chance to Banana their capital against minimal defenses with City Raider grenadiers.

And yes, that's the Pyramids in the city. I'm attacking the Khmer first in order to use that for Universal Suffrage before the end of this golden age. And after capturing that city, once again I used the trick of declaring and moving in on Carthage before the borders adjusted.

Anyway, that's all, folks. Trebuchets and grenadiers easily took out everybody on the far continent.

Done on pretty much one unit type in each category. The only serious exception was two separate siege phases of cats and trebs, with minor exceptions of a few muskets before grenadiers and caravels before galleons. Zero swords, spears, and longbows. And I never used macemen in combat, just built them to upgrade to City Raider grenadiers, after all the vultures were gone.

Actually the highest normal score in my Hall of Fame! (Epic 19 was Advanced Start and Epic 16 was Sid's Sushi. In fact you have to go all the way down to Adventure 38 Farmer's Gambit to find another score without some kind of a cheat setup.)

Well, that was fun. :) Actually I totally forgot about the bonus for having all cities fully healthy. Looking again at my last save, two cities were unhealthy at -2 food. I could have had that by simply whipping away the sickees on the last turn; do I get credit for that?